It is a common misconception that Chinese characters are pictographs or ideograms. Actually Chinese characters can be classified into four types. Knowing these four types can help learners better understand the origin of characters and their meanings.
1. 象形 (xiàngxíng) pictograph
Yes, some characters really are pictographs. However, there forms have become altered or simplified over time so their meaning is not usually immediately obvious. A few common characters which are pictographs and there meanings in English are shown below.
日(sun), 山 (mountain), 羊 (sheep), 川 (river), 手 (hand), 木 (wood), 車 (vehicle)
Only about 4% of characters belong in this category.
2. 指事 (zhǐshì) pictograph for abstract words
The simplest example of characters used to define abstract words is 上 (up) and 下 (down). Another paired example is 本 (original) and 末 (final). This probably needs a little explanation. The two characters show a mark on a tree (木). When the mark is at the bottom this represents the original, when the mark is at the top of the tree it represents the final.
3. 會意 (huìyì) combination of radicals to give a new meaning
These characters combine two or more radicals to give a new meaning. An example is 明 (bright) formed by combining 日 (sun) and 月 (moon). I don't think the meaning of this one is particularly obvious. It could also logically refer to the Earth as it between the sun and the moon or refer to a planet or other object in space.
Another is example is 看 (to look) formed by the combination of 手 (hand) and 目 (eye).
4. 形聲 (xíngshēng) meaning radical plus phonetic component
The majority of Chinese characters fall into this category. These characters combine a phonetic element with a meaning element. A simple example is 馬 (mǎ; horse) a pictograph. The combination of 女 (woman) plus 馬 (mǎ) gives the character 媽 (mā; mother). One radical helps to indicate the meaning while the other indicates the pronunciation.
About 80% of Chinese characters fall into this category. The biggest problem with these type of characters is that changes in the pronunciation of characters over time mean the phonetic does not always indicate the exact pronunciation.
This is further explained in John DeFrancis's book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. A summary of the key points is taken from Wikipedia.
# The Chinese writing system has a heavy phonological basis, shown in the phonetic elements common in more than half of Chinese characters. Unfortunately they are missing from many common characters, causing many foreign scholars to miss the point that they are a necessary resource for Chinese readers. It is not a brilliant ideographic script; it is a lousy phonetic script.
# Although there are ideograms in the Chinese writing system, it is not ideographic in a strict sense. There can be no such thing as a completely ideographic writing system, where there would be symbols to stand for all possible individual concepts and where morphemes or phonemes would play no significant role in writing most individual words down. For instance, most Chinese words are written down as phono-semantic compounds that include a non-ideographic, phonetic element.
# The Chinese script, with its huge number of characters, its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the literacy improvement efforts of the Chinese society, and needs to be replaced by a more efficient writing system if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization.
Note: The English terms for the categories used in Illustrated Account of Chinese Characters are (1) pictographs 象形 (2) indicatives 指事 (3) ideographs 會意 and (4)
phonetic compounds 形聲
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